Kennewick Man ‘could have been Asian’

Researchers spent 16 days poring over Kennewick Man — the skeleton found on the bank of the Columbia River in 1996 — in two visits to Seattle’s Burke Museum in 2005 and 2006, after a court ruling permitting the study.

Since then, they’ve said little about what they’ve learned. A new, 688-page, peer-reviewed book, “Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton,” changes that. Texas A&M University Press is scheduled to publish the book in September.

Kennewick Man’s skull isn’t really like those of any current people, “but most closely resembles Pacific Rim populations such as the Ainu of Japan and Polynesians, reflecting deep roots in coastal Asian groups,” Smithsonian wrote.

“He could have been an Asian,” co-editor Richard Jantz, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, told The Washington Post. “One of the things we always tend to do is underestimate the mobility of early people.”

He was 5 feet, 7 inches tall — big for the time — and 163 pounds, with ample muscles and a wide-bodied frame that helped him navigate the steppe-like habitat along the northwest coast of North America. He appears to have been right handed and adept at making stone tools and at using a spear thrower.

Kennewick Man suffered six broken ribs from blunt-force trauma to the chest and had a stone point from a spear lodged in his pelvis for multiple years during his lifetime.

He lived among such big game as deer, pronghorn antelope and bighorn sheep but primarily ate fish and marine mammals, consistent with the lifestyle of someone traveling from the northern part of the continent down the coast to Washington.